1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to communication, specifically, the method and apparatus for resuming sessions between a client device and an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system in customer services.
2. Description of the Related Art
Contact centers are becoming more and more popular to a lot of companies. A lot of companies are providing more services by way of contact centers. The working environment of a large contact center can be a room with lots of open cubical cells in which service representatives sitting in front of a computer with their earphones on, providing services to ‘invisible’ customers. Various resources needed by a contact center include human resources, computers and communication devices, among which the costs of human resources of service representatives are major costs.
Self services via the IVR system are usually adopted in phone based contact centers in order to improve the performance, such as to reduce latency, hang-up ratio and operational costs. The costs of human resources will be significantly reduced by using the IVR system which provides 7*24 full time services to the customers with fewer service representatives needed. Customers can obtain self services including caller identification, caller routing, information requesting and other transactions via the IVR system.
FIG. 1 shows the structure of an IVR system 100 in the prior art. For phone services, when a call of a certain customer arrives at the Private Branch Exchange (PBX) 110, the PBX 110 sends information of the incoming call, including the calling number of the customer, to related components in the IVR system 120 for processing. In the meantime, the call enters the waiting queue in the IVR system 120 and gets connected when an IVR port becomes available. After connected, the IVR will provide the customer with a voice navigation menu from which the customer can select the wanted service according to the voice guidance, such as voice, fax or computer access, etc.
In most cases, phone based contact centers provide rather detailed menus for a customer to select. Therefore, the customer usually needs to narrow down his/her requests by selecting the menus from within the upper levels to the lower levels in order to obtain the wanted services. This can be a sequence of selections. For example, in FIG. 2, an IVR voice navigation menu is shown. Here, if the customer wants to get information about high density DVD, he/she may have to go through the menus and make the selection as follows: Department→DVD→High Density, altogether three levels of menus.
The session in customer service can be terminated due to various reasons before he/she can get the wanted service. For example, the customer will have to hang up when prompted with the message that no service personnel is available after he/she has gone through some level to level selection in the IVR system even though customer still needs more help from a service personnel. Another example would be the case where a mobile phone is used to reach the contact center. The connection with the contact center will probably be terminated before the customer can get the wanted service while moving due to an unstable wireless channel. A specific example could involve a tourist who is driving a car and wants to get some guidance from the contact center of a touring agency; the connection with the contact center may be terminated when he/she enters a tunnel or some other place with weak signals.
Incomplete service will significantly reduce the customer's satisfaction. The customer will have to re-input all the related information when he/she tries to reconnect to the contact center to get the wanted service. In one of the examples mentioned above, he/she will have to make the three-level selection again, which is troublesome and further reduce the satisfaction.
The line resource of the contact center will be used again because the customer will need to re-input all related information. During peak time, a new customer will probably have to hang up due to the busy line, and in the meantime, the retrying customer cannot get satisfactory service, further reducing the customer's satisfaction.
Accordingly, there is a need to solve the problems stated above.